In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is just not in the end person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers close to the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales relies on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local festival or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you will be better off in the event you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to permit at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you can and should begin advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the challenge. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to begin marketing till you will have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the very least a few further weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising message to achieve the meant audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing project begins whenever you hand off the entire photographs, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must most likely permit a little bit further time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
